Andrea C. Tricco PhD, MScScientist and Lead of the Knowledge Synthesis TeamAssociate Professor Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of TorontoAssociate Editor Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, BMC Medical Research Methodology, Systematic Reviews

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?

Response: Falls are the leading cause of injury among older adults and account for $2 billion in direct health-care costs annually ($31 billion in costs to Medicare in the United States in 2012). We aimed to determine which types of fall-prevention programs may be effective for reducing falls in older people.

MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings?

Response: Exercise, along with vision assessment and treatment, as well as an assessment and possible modification of a person’s living environment, reduced the risk of injurious falls by 23% compared to usual care.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: Elderly represent the fastest growing segment of incident dialysis patients in Unites States. The annual mortality in end stage renal disease (ESRD) patients is very high ~ 20%.

Since most of the deaths occur in the first year of dialysis, it is possible that health conditions present prior to initiation of dialysis may impact long-term outcomes. In this study, we determined the impact of poor functional status at the time of dialysis initiation and pre-dialysis health status on type of dialysis modality, type of hemodialysis access and one-year mortality in elderly dialysis patients. We evaluated 49,645 adult incident dialysis patients (1/1/2008 to 12/31/2008) from the United Data Renal Data System (USRDS) with linked Medicare data for at least 2 years prior to dialysis initiation. Mean age of our study population was 72 years. At dialysis initiation, 18.7% reported poor functional status, 88.9% has pre-dialysis hospitalization, and 27.8% did not receive pre-dialysis nephrology care. Patients with poor functional status had higher odds of being initiated on hemodialysis than peritoneal dialysis, lower odds of using arteriovenous access as compared to central venous catheter for dialysis and higher risk of one-year mortality.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: There are vast differences between older people in their abilities and their number of medical conditions. Many people confuse ageing with loss of fitness. Ageing has specific effects (reduction in hearing and skin elasticity for example) but the loss of fitness is not inevitable. Genetics contributes only 20% to diseases. There is abundant evidence that adults who take up physical activity improve their fitness up to the level of someone a decade younger, with improvements in ‘up and go’ times. Physical activity can reduce the severity of most conditions, such as heart disease or the risk of onset or recurrence of many cancers. Inactivity is one of the top four risk factors for most long-term conditions. There is a dose-effect curve. Dementia, disability and frailty can be prevented, reduced or delayed.

The need for social care is based on an individual’s abilities; for example, being unable to get to the toilet in time may increase the need for care from twice daily care givers to needing residential care or live-in care, which increases costs five-fold.

Hospitals contribute to people reducing their mobility, with the ‘deconditioning syndrome’ of bed rest, with 60% of in-patients reducing their mobility.

The total cost of social care in the UK is up to £100 billion, so even modest changes would reduce the cost of social care by several billion pounds a year.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: Treating diabetes requires balancing the risks of long-term harm from under-treatment with the short-term and long-term harm from potential over-treatment. Randomized trials have shown that the benefits of aggressive glycemic control only begin after at least 8 years of treatment. Yet, the harms of aggressive glycemic control – hypoglycemia, cardiovascular events, cognitive impairment, fractures, and death – can happen at any time.

In some older people, “deintensification” of diabetes treatment may be the safer route, because of the risks that come with too-low blood sugar. The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) specifically states that medications other than metformin should be avoided when an older patient’s hemoglobin A1c is less than 7.5%, because the risks of hypoglycemia are larger and the potential benefits of treatment are smaller for older adults with diabetes. Most attention in prior work has focused on undertreatment of diabetes and there has been only limited investigation of patient characteristics associated with overtreatment of diabetes or severe hypoglycemia.

Since the elderly are therefore at greatest risk of overtreatment and Medicare is the primary source of care of the elderly, we examined rates of overtreatment and deintensification of therapy for Medicare beneficiaries, and whether there were any disparities in these rates. We found that almost 11 percent of Medicare participants with diabetes had very low blood sugar levels that suggested they were being over-treated. But only 14 percent of these patients had a reduction in blood sugar medication refills in the next six months.

Jennifer Brach, Ph.D., P.T.
Associate professor, Department of physical therapy
School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
University of Pittsburgh

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: This study compared two different group exercise programs to improve mobility in community-dwelling older adults. The first program, a seated program focused on strength, endurance and flexibility, was based on usual care. The second program, called On the Move, was conducted primarily in standing position and focused on the timing and coordination of movements important for walking. Both programs met two times per week for 12 weeks. It was found that the On the Move program was more effective at improving mobility than the usual seated program.

Response: Apathy is common in nursing home (NH) patients with dementia and is repeatedly found to be the most prevalent neuropsychiatric symptom. Apathy is defined by diminished or lack of motivational, goal-directed behavior, and a lack of cognition and emotional affect. Apathy leads to reduced interest and participation in the main activities of daily living, diminished initiative, early withdrawal from initiated activities, indifference, and flattening of affect.

Over the last two decades, more scientific knowledge has become available about specific fronto-subcortical systems in the brain that may be highly involved in apathy. Disruptions in these systems are found in patients with frontal lobe damage resulting from, for instance, (early-onset) dementia, traumatic brain injury, stroke, or multiple sclerosis. Fronto-subcortical circuits also play an important role in neurological disorders involving the basal ganglia such as Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease. The neurodegenerative diseases and acquired brain injuries mentioned here are highly prevalent in patients receiving long-term NH care and the widespread clinical manifestation of apathy in NH-patients is thought to be related.

Since apathy is very common in nursing home-patients and may lead to a poor prognosis, clear insight into its risk for mortality is needed and NH-staff need to understand this risk.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: Our interest is understanding how continuity of care has changed with the eventual goal of understanding the impact on quality of care.

MedicalResearch.com: What should clinicians and patients take away from your report?

Response: Make sure you have a proxy. Choose your proxy carefully. In this era of health silos and multiple heath care professionals involved in your care at each silo, it is important to have an advocate make sure that you get your care that you need and want.

MedicalResearch.com: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?

Response: Is this changing patterns of care that frail, older persons with multiple chronic illness care is in the hands of multiple health care professionals that practice in silos of health care providing high quality of care?

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: In older persons, falls are the leading cause of injuries and often an adverse-drug reaction is involved. By lowering medication-related fall risk, loss of quality of life, institutionalization, and death can be prevented. Nevertheless, for optimal medication-withdrawal in clinical practice, better understanding of medication-related fall risk is essential, especially for the group of cardiovascular drugs, as previous studies showed contradictory results. Therefore, the objective of our study was to assess whether specific drug characteristics determine beta-blocker related fall risk, a frequently prescribed cardiovascular drug.

Our study showed that fall risk was increased in users of non-selective beta-blockers. This was not the case for overall use of beta-blockers or other drug characteristics (lipid solubility, intrinsic sympathetic activity and CYP2D enzyme metabolism).

Response: A lot of cancer screenings are not expected to save lives until up to 10 years later; however, the side effects of the test happen right away. Because of this, clinical guidelines have recommended against routine screening for those patients who will not live long enough to benefit but may experience the potential harm of the test in the short term. However, many patients with limited life expectancy still receive screening and clinicians are worried about how patients would react if they recommended that patients stop screening. This research is important because it is the first study that explores how patients think about the decision of stopping cancer screening and how patients want to talk to their doctors about this issue. Understanding patient perspectives would help improve screening practices and better align recommendations and patient preference.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: In the past decade, there has been a shift in the concept of successful aging from a focus on life span to health span. We all want to age gracefully “expecting” optimal health, quality of life and independence.

Centenarians are living examples to the progress we have made in health care. They are the best example of successful aging since they have escaped, delayed or survived the major age-related diseases and have reached the extreme limit of human life. However, little is known about Veterans Centenarians’ incidence of chronic illness and its impact on survival.

Utilizing the VA Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW), I worked with my colleagues’ researchers and identified 3,351 centenarians who were born between 1910 and 1915. The majority were white men who served in World War II and had no service related disability. The study found that 85 % of all the centenarians had no incidence of major chronic conditions between the ages of 80 and 99 years of age. The data demonstrate that Veteran centenarians tend to have a better health profile and their incidence of having one or more chronic illness is lower than in the general population.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: Late-life depression, also called vascular depression, is highly prevalent, recurrent and difficult to treat. Anti-depressants only relieve symptoms in about 50% of the patients. So we urgently need new treatment targets for this disease.

In this study we found that microvascular dysfunction, irrespective if you measure this by biomarkers in the blood or in the brain, is associated with an increased risk for depression. Moreover, we found evidence from longitudinal studies that microvascular dysfunction, at least of the brain, may actually be a cause of depression. To investigate this, we undertook a meta-analyses of data from over 40,000 individuals of whom over 9,000 had a depression.

Researchers at the National Taiwan University Hospital randomly assigned 377 patients undergoing abdominal surgery for a malignant tumor to an intervention (n = 197) or usual care (n = 180).

Postoperative delirium occurred in 6.6 percent of mHELP participants vs 15.1 percent of control individuals (odds of delirium reduced by 56 percent). Intervention group participants received the mHELP for a median of 7 days, and they had a median LOS that was two days shorter (12 vs 14 days).

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: There are an increasing number of older adults being prescribed statins for primary prevention, but the evidence for the benefit for older adults is unclear.

Our study finds that in the ALLHAT-LLT clinical trial, there were no benefits in either all-cause mortality or cardiovascular outcomes for older adults who did not have any evidence of cardiovascular disease at baseline.

Response: Falls are an important patient safety issue among elderly patients and may lead to extended hospitalization and patient harm. Particularly important in elderly patients are high risk drugs such as sleep medications which are known to increase fall risk and should be dosed lower in elderly patients.

In this study we looked at patients aged 65 years or older who fell during hospitalization. We found that in 62%, patients had been given at least one high risk medication that was linked to fall risk, within 24 hours before their fall. Interestingly, we found that also a substantial proportion of these medications were given at doses higher than generally recommended for elderly patients.

Response: Adjuvant radiation following breast conserving surgery has been well
established in the management of early-stage breast cancer as it has
been shown to decrease the incidence of ipsilateral breast tumor
recurrences and also reduce breast cancer mortality. Large prospective
trials have shown for elderly patients with favorable, ER positive
pathology, omission of radiation after lumpectomy can be considered.

However, women with ER negative disease were typically not included in
these trials and given their higher risk for relapse as well as lack of
effective endocrine therapy, we hypothesized that adjuvant radiation
would benefit women over 70 years with early-stage, ER negative tumors.

Response: In 2014, the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) updated their guidelines for the management of skin and soft tissue infection in response to high MRSA infection rates as well as high treatment failure rates for skin and soft tissue infections. Greater than 1 in 5 patients treated for a skin abscess will fail initial treatment.

Historically antibiotics have been shown to be unnecessary in the treatment of uncomplicated purulent infections. This notion has been recently challenges when authors published a randomized control trial using trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazone in the NEJM that demonstrated a minimal increase in cure rates for outpatient treatment of uncomplicated skin purulent skin infections. In this study they did not follow IDSA-guidelines nor model or stratify their analysis. It is possible their findings may be due to at-risk patient groups that did not receive antibiotics. Many widely used clinical decision rules incorporate age into their decision algorithms, however the IDSA did not do this with their recent guidelines.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: The objective of this study was to use baseline anatomical brain MRI scans to prospectively predict weight loss success following an intensive lifestyle intervention. In the study, 52 participants, age 60 to 79, were recruited from the Cooperative Lifestyle Interventions Programs II (CLIP-II) project. The participants were overweight or obese (BMI greater than 28 and less than 42) and had a history of either cardiovascular disease or metabolic syndrome. All participants had a baseline MRI scan, and then were randomized to one of three groups – diet only, diet plus aerobic exercise training or diet plus resistance exercise training. The goal of the 18-month diet and exercise program was a weight loss of 7 to 10 percent of body mass.
Basic brain structure information garnered from the MRIs was classified using a support vector machine, a type of computerized predictive algorithm. Specifically, we trained a computational predictive model which mapped each subject’s brain scan to weight loss performance. Predictions were based on baseline brain gray and white matter volume from the participants’ MRIs and compared to the study participants’ actual weight loss after the 18 months. The accuracy of the model was then tested, and our prediction algorithms were 78% accurate in predicting successful weight loss. Brain gray matter volume provided higher prediction accuracy compared with white matter and the combination of the two outperformed either one alone.

Response: Recovery after major disaster poses potential risks of dementia for the elderly population, such as resettlement in unfamiliar surroundings or psychological trauma. However, no previous studies have demonstrated that experiences of disaster are associated with the deterioration of dementia symptomatology, controlling changes of risk factors in a natural experimental setting.

We prospectively examined whether experiences of a disaster were associated with incident dementia in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.

MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings?

Response: The main findings are that major housing damage and home destroyed were associated with cognitive decline: regression coefficient for levels of dementia symptoms = 0.12, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.01 to 0.23 and coefficient = 0.29, 95% CI: 0.17 to 0.40, respectively.

MedicalResearch.com: What should readers take away from your report?

Response: The effect size of destroyed home is comparable to the impact of incident stroke (coefficient = 0.24, 95% CI: 0.11 to 0.36).

From these findings, cognitive decline should be added to the list of health risks of older survivors in the aftermath of disasters.

Response: Randomized controlled trials are considered the gold standard to inform health care delivery. Unfortunately, no randomized controlled trials of screening colonoscopy have been completed. Ongoing trials exclude persons aged 75 or older, and will not have mature results before 2025. However, healthy persons older than 75 may live long enough to benefit from colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. The Medicare program reimburses screening colonoscopy without an upper age limit since the year 2001. We used the extensive experience of Medicare beneficiaries to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of screening colonoscopy.

Gwen Bergen, PhD
Division of Unintentional Injury
National Center for Injury Prevention and Control
CDC

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: Older adult falls are the leading cause of injury death and disability for adults aged 65 years and older (older adults). In this study, we analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. Our study found that, in 2014, older Americans reported 29 million falls. Almost a quarter of these or 7 million falls required medical treatment or restricted activity for at least one day. Women reported a higher percentage of falls (30%) compared with men (27%). Whites and American Indian/Alaskan Natives (AI/AN) were more likely to fall compared with Blacks and Asian/Pacific Islanders; and AI/AN were more likely to report a fall injury compared with all other racial/ethnic groups. The percentage of older adults who reported a fall varied by state, ranging from 21% in Hawaii to 34% in Arkansas.

Response: Melanoma is responsible for most of skin cancer-related deaths and the cancer with the highest cost per death and the highest lost of productive-life years in Europe.

Despite the importance on early diagnosis of cutaneous melanoma, there are few studies analyzing the reasons that lead patients with melanoma to consult. The impact on prognosis in patients with melanoma according to who first detects melanoma have not been established.

Response: Falls are the leading cause of both fatal and non-fatal injuries among Americans aged 65 and older. In 2000, the direct cost of falls were estimated to be $179 million for fatal falls and $19 billion for non-fatal falls. Fall injuries and deaths are expected to rise as more than 10,000 Americans turn 65 each day. Within the next 15 years, the U. S. population of older Americans is anticipated to increase more than 50%, with the total number of older adults rising to 74 million by 2030.

Response: Previous research has shown that volunteering in older age is associated with better mental and physical health, but it’s unclear whether this extends to other age groups. We aimed to examine the association of volunteering with mental health or well-being among the British population across all ages.

The British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) was used which has collected information from 1991 to 2008 from over 5000 households. The published study has analysed over 66,000 responses representing the whole of the UK. The BHPS included a wide range of questions on leisure time activities, which covered the frequency of formal volunteering—from at least once a week through to once a year or less, or never. The BHPS also included a validated proxy for mental health/emotional wellbeing known as the GHQ-12.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: The US population is rapidly aging and older adults consume a disproportionate share of operations. Older adults experience a high rate of postoperative complications, which can affect quality of life. In this study, function, mobility and living situation are considered together as independent living. The study examined a large surgical database for the occurrence of loss of independence (defined as a decline in function or mobility, or increased care needs in one’s living situation) and its relationship to traditional outcomes such as readmission and death after the time of discharge. Patients included in the study were age 65 or older and underwent an inpatient surgical operation. Loss of independence was assessed at the time of discharge. Readmission and death-after-discharge were assessed up to 30 days postoperatively.

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: The impetus for this article was our experience from working at FAU’s Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing’s Louis and Anne Green Memory and Wellness Center with families as we conducted assessments of older adults referred to our program by family members or law enforcement. We realized that there is a need to educate nurses that a) they can help to identify persons who may be at risk for unsafe driving before accidents occur, and b) there are resources to help families and nurses navigate this challenging topic. This awareness is especially important for persons and friend/family members who find themselves trying to cope with a known or potential diagnosis of dementia.

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